It’s not every week that mainstream news merges two of my podcast worlds into one story, so if you’ll indulge a brief detour from the NBA Finals, let’s talk about Steph Curry’s new endorsement deal with Li-Ning. The news came down earlier this week from Shams Charania and ESPN, and was subsequently updated with a dollar figure:
Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry has signed a 10-year, $400 million endorsement contract with Chinese sports apparel company Li-Ning, industry sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania, ending a drawn-out recruitment process following Curry’s departure from Under Armour in November. …
The agreement will include basketball products, athleisure lifestyle wear, the ability for Curry to sign athletes under his brand, and a full golf line.
Curry is one of my favorite players of all time and I’ll spend the next 30 years defending his legacy to anyone who asks, but this will be more of a China post than a basketball post. In general, I had three, parallel reactions to this deal.
It’s a Good Business Decision
Curry’s long past the point of potentially benefiting from Nike or Adidas marketing, and it would have been politically complicated for Nike to add Steph alongside LeBron. A mountain of cash from an upstart makes sense. Alongside the $400 million in benefits, the only possible downside to signing with Li-Ning would be the reputational cost of partnering with a Chinese company that’s aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (as all major Chinese companies have to be), but that’s unlikely to be a problem.
One thing that’s become clear talking about China every week while reading American news every day is that there’s a chronic, collective blindspot when it comes to the reputation of the CCP and its affiliates in the Western imagination. Governments care, but most people don’t. If Steph Curry had signed with a Saudi Arabian company, for example, it would have been a bigger problem. An Israeli company might have led to protests and boycotts outside Warriors games. And of course, Curry never would have signed with a Russian company.
China, though, tends to get a pass from the sort of people who are otherwise vocal about injustice. I’m reminded here of Victor Wembanyama posing last summer with a portrait of Mao in a photo that now goes viral every few months. Wemby said in January he was “horrified” by the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota, and added, “I’m not going to sit here and give some politically correct [answer]. I think it’s crazy that some people might make it seem like or make it sound like the murder of civilians is acceptable.”
Last summer, then, Wemby may not have been aware that Mao’s policies during the Great Leap Forward and his purges during the Cultural Revolution killed anywhere between 15 million and 50 million Chinese citizens, many millions of whom “were worked, starved or beaten to death in China.” Posing in front of Mao really shouldn’t be all that different from posing in front of Hitler. Mao oversaw death and misery on the scale of the Second World War, and all of it happened during peacetime. Yet that history has been entirely obscured from modern Chinese citizens and, clearly, much of the world.
Today’s Party leadership remains plenty capricious and ruthless in its own right. Weeks after Wemby left the Shaolin Temple, the temple’s head priest was jailed for alleged corruption, and who knows whether he was guilty; this week he was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Another priest, Ezra Jin, has been jailed along with dozens of other pastors since last year, for running an unsanctioned church that threatens the Party’s political control. In Xinjiang, millions of Muslims have been systematically oppressed for more than a decade. I could list literally dozens of other examples, but I don’t think anyone engaging with the evidence seriously contests the point that the CCP is a brutal, oft-sociopathic, authoritarian government that’s effectively running a surveillance state (and that’s before we get to what they’re doing in America).
For Steph’s purposes, though: the history and contemporary activities of the CCP have not gotten in the way of Americans accepting Chinese money, or courting Chinese consumers, for the past 25 years. Everyone is happy to realize a peace dividend and build a cultural bridge wherever it’s profitable, and that includes the NBA itself. It hasn’t mattered to anyone that the cultural bridges have led to intensified repression of Chinese citizens and funded the modernization of an increasingly aggressive PLA. And if no one is going to care or hold anyone to account, Steph would be crazy not to take the $400 million.
On the other hand….
God, What a Lame Business Decision
The deal is a win for China on at least two levels. First, it reminded me of an announcement in September 2025 from the State Council General Office: “On Unlocking the Potential of Sports Consumption-Opinions on Further Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Sports Industry.” Beyond the characteristically turgid headline, that guidance included a directive to “Study and formulate an implementation plan to advance the high-quality development of the sports equipment manufacturing industry” and promised to “support qualified businesses to go global.” Li-Ning, for now, does almost all of its business in China.
That State Council announcement may have been signaling that the Party was going to run the same playbook in the sports industry that it has used in dozens of others—allocating government support to Chinese companies instead of Chinese households, and assisting its favored companies using a variety of subsidies and non-market tactics. That support then allows Chinese companies to crowd out market-leading foreign incumbents in China, before flooding the world with artificially cheap, high-quality products that undercut those same incumbents abroad. This behavior is “making trade impossible” and causing quite a bit of global alarm these days, with near-daily headlines like “China’s Economy Is Taking Everyone Down.” If Anta and Li-Ning are now supercharged by state support as they set their sights on Nike and Adidas and global markets, Steph would be officially playing for Team Overcapacity. (Last fall on Sharp China, my co-host Bill Bishop said of the State Council messaging: “It’s probably very good news for the globally famous athletes. There’s big pots of money awaiting some of the world’s top athletes.”)
Regardless of whether Steph is an indirect beneficiary of CCP subsidies, Curry in Chinese sneakers will help normalize China’s image and assist in the efforts to ensure that no one in America thinks too hard about the CCP’s track record domestically or abroad. That starts with Li-Ning, previously a major beneficiary of a not-entirely-organic 2021 boycott of Nike and other Western brands in China, when those brands raised concerns surrounding forced labor at internment camps in Xinjiang. Li-Ning itself has been accused of benefiting from that same slave labor, and their products were banned from the U.S. in 2022 over ties to North Korean labor, although that ban has since been lifted.
More generally, if you read the first section and wondered why, exactly, everyone in America seems to talk around the worst CCP abuses, part of the answer is quite simple: the Party aggressively buys the loyalty and silence of people, companies, and institutions throughout the West. What this can look like in practice is Alysa Liu’s father, a former Chinese dissident, being quietly harassed by CCP agents 30 years later, while Eileen Gu is front and center competing for China and starring in NBC’s coverage.
And for Steph, this sucks! He’s a genuine American icon, not a snowboarder. He should be better than participating in any of this. He’s made $400 million from the NBA and hundreds of millions more from Under Armour, among a variety of ventures. This deal is an ethically dubious cash grab from someone who does not need the money. If LeBron did something like this, he’d be justifiably crushed for it.
Finally, though…
Steph’s Lame Business Decision Is Fine
Maybe this particular reaction is informed by reading two weeks of news about Beijing’s intensifying crackdown on offshore investments and attempts to secure its future AI ecosystem by banning AI executives and researchers from leaving China, but it’s kind of refreshing to live in a country where Steph Curry is free to make hundreds of millions of dollars doing soft power work for our greatest adversary.
First of all, America can survive things like the TikTok deal, Eileen Gu leading parades, Western companies toeing the line with Beijing, or Curry leading the unstoppable rise of an insurgent CCP-backed shoe brand (Nike may be a mercy kill at this point). These are annoying developments, but not existential problems.
Second, in modern U.S.-China conversations one way to sound intelligent is to express anxiety about the weaknesses and blindspots of the capitalist system. And sure, there are downsides. We offshored most of the nation’s manufacturing capacity to improve profit margins and appease shareholders. Our investment community doesn’t have the patience for many of the low-margin, years-long buildouts that are essential to solidifying industrial supply chains. Our political system is liberal and chaotic, and free to be compromised by all kinds of corporate leaders whose private interests are at odds with the national interest. Also, Donald Trump Jr. appears to be on the board of every company in America at the moment.
On the other hand, let’s not overdo it. I’ve already written that the long-term wisdom of the Chinese system is overstated, and China’s certainly no stranger to corruption. Specific to the U.S., though, there’s a cultural and legal deference to personal freedom, constitutional protections, and market principles that is quite clearly a comparative advantage of its own.
That culture is why Steph criticism will only go so far. It’s also why Elon Musk built a factory in Shanghai, but all his businesses live here. And in general, that culture is why the messy and occasionally embarrassing U.S. system nevertheless has a much better track record of innovation than China does, a far more robust investment climate, and more upside and legal protections for all the talent and businesses that sustain the system. There’s a reason, after all, that China has to confiscate the passports of its most successful AI researchers. Free markets actually work quite well.
So thank you, Steph, for that reminder. And to Li-Ning, now spending $400 million to pay Curry until he’s nearly 50 years old, best of luck!
Letters of Recommendation
At the end here, a few recs for reading and listening, since it’s been too long. Here are a variety of things I’ve enjoyed over the past week:
- “When the Experimenter Fails the Marshmallow Test” is first and foremost a great title for an essay, and what follows from there, from John Carter, is a perceptive look at the consequences of various boomer excesses and the resulting absence of opportunity for young people. It’s on one hand a useful qualifier to the optimistic sentiments above, and on the other, just a really good piece of writing.
- This is several weeks old, but this New York Times story on what Israel and the United States were trying to with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the single craziest reporting from three months of Iran coverage. I have no idea whether it’s true, but I stand in awe of the reported sequence of events.
- Related to last week’s article: abandoning the SAT en masse is yet another ideologically driven reform from the beginning of the decade that has not aged well, including across California universities.
- Stephen Kotkin on a podcast talking through Iran, Taiwan, Ukraine’s drone industry, and more. For my money, Kotkin is the best and most entertaining geopolitical takesman there is.
- Another podcast, this time with George Fridman on the history of the U.S. and Cuba, and U.S. considerations over the next few months and years.
- Aakash Japi offers a comprehensive look at jet engines, and a point that came up during last week’s Sharp Tech—despite a few fun espionage scandals, the Chinese cannot, for the live of them, catch up in turbines and jet engines. Japi explains why.
And with that, we’re done. Have a great weekend, and I will see you next week.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email,